The spreading of poisonous anti-Semitic lies

The lie that Israeli citizens were informed in advance of the Sept. 11 attacks and stayed home from the World Trade Center is one of the ugliest slanders of Jews in history. It is as brutal as the medieval claim that Jews drank the blood of Christian children to celebrate Passover. In the United States the story has been circulated widely in the last two years by white supremacists like David Duke and the National Alliance, the country’s most virulent neo-Nazi group.

Sahm Adrangi ’03 (“Not just another conspiracy theory: manipulating anger,” 2/26) suggests that Jewish groups shouldn’t be making such a fuss because Amiri Baraka only devoted one stanza out of 60 to propagating this lie — his poem “has precious little to do with Israel,” he sniffs. That argument is absurd on its face. If Adrangi had spent one of his column’s 14 paragraphs arguing that the Holocaust never happened, for instance, it would have been just as unforgiveable.

Unfortunately, Adrangi does devote a full four paragraphs to another vicious anti-Semitic canard: that Jews exercise control of the media. That claim has a distinguished pedigree — it was a central tenet of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” To see it argued by a columnist in the Yale Daily News left my jaw hanging.

Adrangi’s column was the most poisonous I have ever read in a college newspaper.